Children’s Summit: It’s a Small World : * Most of County’s Future Adults Are Doing Fine--It’s the Rest That Need Urgent Help

Consider the children in Orange County: there are almost 600,000 of them, as participants at last weekend’s first-ever summit on children in the county learned. That is a sizable interest group. And children are the human fabric of the county’s future.

The good news is that the children generally are healthier and better educated than many of their counterparts nationwide. But many are being caught up in poverty, violence and problems associated with a lack of stability in the family. Many are without adequate care or housing.

Orange County is no island apart, isolated from the problems of urbanization and alienation. Fortunately, there was an anticipatory dimension to the summit, which was two years in the planning by a caring group of local advocates. The county owes them a debt of gratitude for their efforts to get the county to invest in its future.

Indeed, a broad group of participants gathered at Chapman University and made some meaningful pledges.

For example, the Orangewood Children’s Foundation announced that it will spend up to $10 million on children’s programs during the next seven years and will soon award up to $100,000 in grants to local child-care agencies. The Fieldstone Co., a Newport Beach development firm, plans to donate $1 million during the next two years to local children’s programs. And the county is working with Cal State Fullerton to develop ways of tracking high school dropouts, teen-age birth rates and the numbers of children with sexually transmitted diseases. These statistics can help design strategies for dealing with the problems in a meaningful way.

The summit cannot be expected to provide miracles. But it was a useful way of bringing the resources of a community to bear on the problems of its young people. And in doing that, a county with a wealth of talent can contribute to making its own future a little brighter.